by davidgomes on 7/9/23, 9:41 PM with 181 comments
by bhaney on 7/9/23, 10:49 PM
> I just write them in Notion, and then I copy-paste them into the Ghost editor
> every now and then I have to hack some CSS together to fix some bugs
> the theme can only be compiled with an ancient version of npm
> the code is really messy, so at some point I won’t be able to maintain it any longer
> images don’t work very well with my theme
To each their own, but to me this sounds like an absolutely terrible "website stack"
by egypturnash on 7/10/23, 12:17 AM
right there
at any time you could have hit that button and spent a while poking around its immense collection of default themes and installed the "I do not like the block site editor, please give me the old editor" plugin and had a big, empty text box just begging for you to fill it with words, all the time you spent faffing about with jekyll and hugo and ghost and your custom style looking for the absolutely perfect version of the the same black text on white ground style that a zillion templates have been made of could have been spent writing blog posts instead
but I guess you gained some experience fooling around with the technologies underlying Hugo and Jekyll and maybe that was surprisingly useful in other parts of your life, and maybe that was better in the long run?
anyway, good luck putting words in that big blank text box you have finally perfected.
by raajg on 7/9/23, 11:34 PM
- Spend a lot of time finalizing the stack
- Spend a lot of time styling the new blog
- Migrate some of the posts from the old stack to the new stack
- Write a 1-2 new posts in the new blog
- Stop writing
- After a few months, I come back to writing a post and realize there are dependencies to upgrade, scripts to run, and what not. I give up for at least a year.
After 10 years of having gone into this cycle over and over again, I'm currently using the following setup:
- IA Writer -> Gitlab -> Cloudflare pages
To write a new post, I just have to create a new file in IA Writer and save it. That's all.
A bare bones shell script blog.sh converts markdown into HTML (locally on my mac), invokes git push to Gitlab. And there's a 'Pages' project in Cloudflare which listens to changes to my Gitlab repo, and just statically publishes whatever's in the 'site' directory.
I've written more posts in this new stack than ever before. And I think the best part is that I just need to 'create new file' and 'save'.
by idlewords on 7/9/23, 10:39 PM
by superkuh on 7/9/23, 10:54 PM
Having it on my home computer also gives me massive storage space and ease of editing. The only cost is ~$10/yr for the .com domain. DNS hosting is free from zoneedit (they've been great the last 20 years).
by ldoughty on 7/9/23, 11:03 PM
I merge a change to master. Webhook triggers. Lambda builds the static site from a fixed version (for consistency) of Hugo (static site generator) and pushes the files to a CloudFront / S3 Website.
I can revisit my site after a year of non-maintenance and can add something without worrying about version changes breaking the site.. I don't even need any special software -- a text editor and git.
(For Rapid development, I generally run Hugo locally, but I can do a typo or link update from any computer very quickly)
by HermanMartinus on 7/10/23, 4:55 AM
by m3adow on 7/10/23, 6:23 AM
I host my blogs on GH pages or Netlify. Additionally, I dump the notes I want to share with the world on GH pages as well with the excellent Obsidian Github Publisher [0] Plugin. I don't really care about analytics for a personal blog though.
Works for me, and costs nothing.
[0]: https://github.com/ObsidianPublisher/obsidian-github-publish...
by cloverich on 7/9/23, 10:33 PM
Any static hosting sites that provide this for free today?
by antigirl on 7/10/23, 7:44 AM
In the end I just made my own from scratch and just use S3 for hosting [manual uploads, as i don't update it often]
simple HTML responsive grid, using tailwind CDN. No build steps.
https://www.stayanotherminute.com/ [yet to compress images, currently 14mb worth of images so mobile data users be warned]
by ashton314 on 7/9/23, 10:25 PM
by manuelmoreale on 7/10/23, 6:38 AM
As for the cost, I mean, could a site like this be run for a lot less than that? Absolutely. But if he’s happy paying those money then who cares.
It’s certainly not a setup I’d personally recommend.
by system2 on 7/9/23, 11:00 PM
by rad_gruchalski on 7/9/23, 11:07 PM
Next step is to offboard from GitHub pages and move the blog directly to Hetzner where my analytics are hosted.
by susam on 7/9/23, 11:13 PM
A Common Lisp program generates static HTML files from handwritten HTML content. The website has minimal dynamic elements in the form of comment and subscriber forms, implemented using Common Lisp + Hunchentoot. All content is written in simple HTML, facilitated by Emacs' HTML+ mode. The CSS is basic, offering support for light and dark modes. I host the website on a virtual private server (VPS) running Debian and Nginx. The CSS and HTML layout change very rarely, so it allows me to focus on content.
This stack has proven to be stable and cost-effective, with the server handling low traffic of 1 request every 5-10 seconds or so on normal days. During occasional spikes, like when a page reaches the front page of HN, the traffic increases to about 10-20 requests per second but this is still a piece of cake for the $5/month VPS the website is running on.
"Analytics" is just a handful of make targets in a Makefile that invokes commands like zgrep, sort, uniq, etc. to filter the access logs and show me which posts are getting the most hits, which days are the busiest, etc. That's all. I'm quite happy with this stack and I think this will serve me well for the next few decades.
by dfcowell on 7/9/23, 11:18 PM
I self-host Ghost and Plausible Analytics (along with several other services,) on an Unraid box at home, fronted by Cloudflare, and it holds up well to load. Costs next to nothing, too, since it inherits hand-me-down parts from my main desktop PC.
by KronisLV on 7/10/23, 12:52 AM
Some optional customization for page templates/fonts/CSS, some CI so I can build and deploy it inside of a Docker container, Matomo for analytics that respect privacy (which I already use elsewhere) and some additional web server configuration to hide anything interesting behind an additional login and I'm good. Maybe backups and uptime monitoring if I'm feeling brave, which is what most sites should also have (so copy + paste there).
All of that for under 100 euros per year (could also pay half of that if I didn't host anything else on the server), the blog has actually survived getting on the front page of HN once or twice and requires relatively little maintenance, at least less than a proper install of WordPress, due to its larger surface area.
The best thing is that it's simple enough for me to understand how it works, to be able to move it anywhere as needed and use more or less plain Markdown for writing the blog posts. Here's a quick example of a recent post: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/ever-wanted-to-read-thousan...
Now all that's left is to find motivation to write more, but at least 90% of my time doesn't go into tinkering with custom fancy solutions, no matter how much I'd love that. Then again, nothing wrong with the alternatives either: 400 euros might be perfectly worth it for some, whereas working with static site generators or even custom CMSes would be a fun experience for others!
by kashunstva on 7/10/23, 9:43 AM
For me, domain registration $16.99 CAD + about $1.00 CAD/month in S3 storage and bandwidth costs ~ $29 CAD per annum. I could probably drive the hosting down to zero deploying on Github; but I'm too lazy to deal with it. And _vide infra_.
Truly though, the biggest cost to me over the years, keeping my little weblog is the time/churn created by the quest for the "Perfect Personal Website Stack." At some point, I realized that migrating from platform-to-platform comes with its own costs and "good-enough" is my new watchword. (It's just Hugo deployed to S3.)
by embit on 7/9/23, 10:58 PM
by sergiotapia on 7/10/23, 6:13 AM
My very first blog, from waaaaaay back in the day on free wordpress? Still up and functioning perfectly. Including the image uploads.
I should move back and just pay these dudes. https://lostinthegc.wordpress.com/2011/05/06/the-25-pc-comin...
by Daegalus on 7/10/23, 4:52 AM
I have settled in Hugo + Cloudflare Pages. I just write markdown, and commit it. Cloudflare does the rest.
Though I am building my own static site generator / server for my blog just for fun that I might switch to. Simple, tailored. And it's written in a way that instead of static files, it's a go app, with all my of my blog posts are embedded and the site lives in an in-memory filesystem.
Most of this was because I wanted to add webmentions.
by nicce on 7/9/23, 10:41 PM
It is good if the provided features are good and enough for you.. but if they aren't, then you are in trouble. I would like to note that Ghost is meant mostly for making content behind subscriptions, since they prioritize adding and improving their subscription features.
The content is meant to be written by hand, with some limitations.
Templating engine is limited, if you want to have some static pages. It is very difficult to generate something from custom data, other than your posts or pages. I wish Ghost had some custom key-value endpoint with their API, but instead if you want to add anything custom, it must be set to the custom configuration file, and it is very limited.
Eventually, you need to embed JSON into JS and then generate some parts of the HTML on client side, what you would instead like to do these in server side. E.g. if you would like to show for example a table with data. Or you need to use some other static site generator to build the HTML table from JSON.
Something very simple, but yet so difficult.
I liked that it was possible to use SQLite3 in production for Ghost. It worked very well and scales as well since it is mostly read operation, but they are officially dropping support for production and using only MySQL. I guess the one argument was, that sending emails for many subscribers was too much for SQLite.
There is also another good analytics service, without cookies and also fully GDPR compliant: https://plausible.io/
by johnobrien1010 on 7/9/23, 10:59 PM
by samsquire on 7/10/23, 7:42 AM
I just use GitHub. I just rely on the default repository view on GitHub.com. I edit in Typora on Windows or on the web interface on GitHub website.
I create a README.md and add markdown headings to the bottom or to the top (bottom if its a journal, top if it's a blog) and then when I get to 100-800 I create a new repository and repeat.
https://github.com/samsquire/ideas (2013)
https://github.com/samsquire/ideas4
https://github.com/samsquire/ideas3
by yawnxyz on 7/10/23, 6:13 AM
- I write everything in Notion, and "publish to web"
- Cloudflare Workers API pulls Notion data and does a bit of SWR, w/ a block
- Sveltekit on Vercel grabs the Notion data, serves the pages
- Everything's up as soon as I type it in Notion!
- Free
- Low maintenance / just works
- Easy to write. I like to plop my thoughts down in short posts, rather than long bursts of well-written essays
- Renders almost all Notion blocks, so what I see is what I get
- Slow, because Notion, but I'm fine with that
Happy to share the code too if anyone cares!
by dharmapure on 7/10/23, 8:22 AM
There is no benefit whatsoever in me rolling my own tech unless it actually allows me to do something I can't do otherwise, and a lack of imagination has been my biggest limiting factor.
Once I saw this I also stopped trying to reimplement Django from scratch too. But, doing these custom and also abandoned own website rolling projects did teach me a lot about how Django and Pelican work!
by DixieDev on 7/10/23, 1:07 AM
by TheCapeGreek on 7/10/23, 8:17 AM
Only $4/mo for a personal account upgrade if you want the repo to be private too.
I moved to Obsidian Publish recently for my blog - so I can keep my knowledgebase, notes, and writing all in one place. $10/mo ($8 on yearly plan).
Carrd.co premium (something like $45/year) for one-pager sites for most other uses - how many small project sites actually need more than one page?
The most time I've spent with this "stack" is reading documentation to decide to move from pages to Obsidian+Carrd.
Definitely cost me less than 400 euro of my own time.
by PrimeMcFly on 7/9/23, 11:48 PM
by synergy20 on 7/9/23, 11:18 PM
replace wordpress with whatever open source blogging software you like.
by dillydogg on 7/10/23, 1:00 AM
by anyfactor on 7/9/23, 11:12 PM
I don't want to have a full Notion CMS but I do like the Notion UI a lot. Maybe I should look into the Notion integration stuff.
Shoutout to goatcounter, if you are looking for a cool web analytics solutiom.
by rogerkirkness on 7/9/23, 11:10 PM
by amsterdorn on 7/10/23, 8:53 AM
Paying even half that much, as someone with development skills as described by OP, is absolutely insane to me. Is this a sponsored post?
by muhammadusman on 7/10/23, 6:13 AM
by cube2222 on 7/10/23, 7:44 AM
I think for personal pages (though honestly for other stuff, too) static pages are much easier to host - you just put them on GitHub Pages / S3 + Cloudfront / CloudFlare Pages and you've got cheap and easy scalability, with almost zero passive costs.
So yeah, I prefer Hugo / Docusaurus.
by XorNot on 7/9/23, 11:08 PM
Easy to configure (just python) and capable of Markdown or Jupyter notebook publishing. The latter was why I wanted it since it gives drag+drop image inserts.
by camillomiller on 7/10/23, 8:28 AM
Wow. I wonder what an imperfect stack looks like to OP
by surprisetalk on 7/10/23, 12:10 PM
[0] https://github.com/surprisetalk/worstpress
It's ~50 lines of bash that builds websites. I hook it up to Cloudflare, and bam, I've got a free and easy blog written with markdown.
by server_man3000 on 7/10/23, 1:43 AM
With that said, I know some people like Ghost, but to pay that much is nuts. I pay less than that for my homelab that runs ~20 services 24/7.
by FireInsight on 7/10/23, 7:58 AM
Astro as SSG, UnoCSS / TailwindCSS for CSS, DecapCMS for CMS. Everything can be hosted for free out of Netlify, auth is handled for free, I can create custom content types for any sort of page or blog or portfolio wanted. Analytics can be done with Google or any amount of paid analytics services.
I recently used that stack for the first time and created a simple portfolio (+ cv & bio) website in a single day, closely mimicking the client's previous Wordpress site which was a broken mess, with a few design tweaks.
If I spent a while figuring out how automatic image compression works, then created a template for it, I'm pretty sure I could bring down the time for creating a totally new unique website down to maybe half a day, or sprinkle in some cooler stuff like a custom interactive frontpage element or something and get it done in the original timeframe.
Edit: Stack for my own website is very similar. But instead of a CMS I write everything straight into HTML.
by discreditable on 7/10/23, 10:21 AM
Now if only I ever felt like writing anything. It's been five years.
by sakras on 7/9/23, 11:04 PM
I guess I am missing analytics, but I don't use those anyway out of respect for my readers' privacy.
by forrestthewoods on 7/10/23, 8:00 AM
My blog is now artisinal HTML+CSS +JS. It’s hosted on Netlify which costs me… I dunno but some number so small I don’t care. Maybe $10/mo on the high end? Plus whatever I pay per year for a domain.
by mattl on 7/9/23, 10:30 PM
by wiihack on 7/10/23, 11:59 AM
by Tade0 on 7/9/23, 11:04 PM
At times I feel tempted to do the same, but ironically enough HTML is not a particularly convenient document format.
by deng on 7/10/23, 8:43 AM
by MatthiasPortzel on 7/9/23, 11:04 PM
by nottorp on 7/10/23, 8:21 AM
[If you need tags imagine this is a sarcasm tag]
by DeathArrow on 7/10/23, 12:19 PM
by rootw0rm on 7/9/23, 10:29 PM
by withinboredom on 7/10/23, 9:37 AM
by jwmoz on 7/10/23, 8:16 AM
by janejeon on 7/10/23, 8:47 AM
by burgerrito on 7/10/23, 12:30 AM
by joinemm on 7/10/23, 9:19 AM
by mediumsmart on 7/10/23, 5:04 AM